CLOSING THE FRAME : HAVING FAITH AND
KEEPING FAITH IN TENNYSON'S " THE
PASSING OF ARTHUR "
By GEORGE P. LANDOW, Ph.D.
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH, BROWN UNIVERSITY,
PROVIDENCE. RHODE ISLAND
C C r I ^HE Passing of Arthur " magnificently closes Tennyson's
JL Idylls of the King by recapitulating the motifs, structure,
and main concerns of the preceding parts of the poem to dramatize
once more the poet's central themes of having faith and keeping
faith. At the same time, it closes the frame upon the poem's
magical world, preparing us for return to our own. Until this
closing section we have found ourselves within Tennyson's
version of the world of the Romance, a world characterized by
passionately sworn oaths, visions, heroic tests, and sharply
resounding clashes of steel on steel. The mist-hidden landscapes, the doubts, and the difficulties in '* The Passing of
Arthur " prepare us for our return to another, a later, a lesser
time, one in which men's perceptions are as limited as their
faith. The poet's ability to create in his reader the sense that
with this last idyll the great deeds of Arthur's realm recede into
the obscuring reaches of time long past strikes a note
simultaneously heroic and elegiac ; for Tennyson convinces us
not only that his characters, like those in all epic and heroic verse,
stand larger than life, but also that their passing from the earth
should occasion in us a piercing sense of loss. In conveying
this conviction that something great, something irreplaceable,
has vanished from the world, The Idylls of the King sounds that
note of bitter yearning for what cannot return with a power that
had not appeared in English poetry since the Anglo-Saxon bards.
Five lines which attribute the tale to " bold Sir Bedivere,/
First made and latest left of all the knights" (1-2),1 act as a
narrative frame that provides the aesthetic distance necessary in
the Victorian age for both the Romance and heroic elegy.
1 The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks (London : Longmans, 1969),
p. I 742. Numbers in text following quotations refer to the line numbers of the
Idylls according to this edition.
28
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Bedivere tells his tale when " the man was no more than a
voice/In the white winter of his age " (3-4), and the poet thereby
suggests the effect of a voice reaching through time : justly so,
for of all Arthur's great deeds, friends, and ideals now only a
verbal record remains. By having the old man tell his tale long
after Arthur has left this world, Tennyson sets the events of
" The Passing of Arthur ", which itself acts as a narrative frame
to the ten central idylls, within its own frame a device which
sets it apart in fictive space and time, both emphasizing and
protecting its imaginative nature.
" Morte d'Arthur **, the earlier version of " The Passing "
which Tennyson published in 1842, had employed a more
awkward, self-conscious frame. According to Ricks, the trial
version of the poem appeared without any such device, but when
the poet published his Arthurian piece he added a fifty-one line
introduction set in Victorian England. This introduction, " The
Epic ", tells how " At Francis Alien's on the Christmas-eve "*
the narrator listens to his friend recite the fragment of an
Arthurian tale which he had written and then burned because he
believed it unsuitable for what Matthew Arnold would term " an
iron time ". By stating objections to the use of Arthurian
legends beforehand, Tennyson attempts to use the ancient
rhetorical refutatio to anticipate and hence weaken opposition.
But the very self-consciousness of this strategy unfortunately
does more harm than good, and when Tennyson published his
modified version of the poem as " The Passing of Arthur " in
1869, the existence of the other sections of The Idylls now
permitted him to avoid this problem by making Bedivere the
narrator. Tennyson also uses this device, well known to readers
1 Ricks, p. 583, line 1. When one recalls that the original version of
" The Passing of Arthur " like In Memoriam, " The Two Voices ", and
" Ulysses " was intimately related to the poet's response to Hallam's death,
the lines he assigns in " The Epic " to Parson Holmes are especially interesting.
The Narrator tells how " half-awake " (line 13) he heard
The parson taking wide and wider sweeps ...
Now hawking at Geology and schism ;
Until I woke, and found him settled down
Upon the general decay of faith
Right through the world.
(lines 14, 16-19)
These, one recalls, are the problems raised by In Memoriam.
" THE PASSING OF ARTHUR "
425
of fantasy, satire, and Utopian fiction, in " The Day Dream ",
and within The Idylls " The Holy Grail " similarly employs it
with particular effectiveness. Percival's narrating the visionary
quests to Ambrosius superbly sets off this section's magical, often
surrealistic experiences from the world of everyday expectations.
" The Passing of Arthur " further serves as a frame to the
inner sections by reiterating the motifs, themes, and poetic
structure of the entire poem. In particular, this section repeats
in darker outline the motif of trial or test, which has always been
a mainstay of the Romance. In the opening section of The
Idylls of the King, we remember, Tennyson had arranged his
tale in terms of a series of tests which Arthur had to pass to make
himself true king : he had to succeed at his first deed of arms by
driving the heathen foe from Leodogran's realm, next he had to
defeat the rebellious nobility, and, finally, he had to conquer the
doubts of Leodogran himself in order to win Guinevere. These
very different kinds of tests appear throughout the individual
idylls as Gareth, Geraint, Enid, Balin, Pelleas, Lancelot and the
other characters reveal themselves to us by the way they encounter
such physical, moral, and spiritual trials. " The Passing of
Arthur " symmetrically closes the frame by echoing the trials of
the opening section. Now, however, the trials the King must
survive are less physical than spiritual. In fact, before he
passes from this world now once again darkened by the destruction of the Round Table, he must endure three, each in its own
way a test of his faith : first, he must overcome his own doubts
about the presence of God in history; second, he must fight
that last grim battle, slaying Modred ; and third, he must work
his will for the last time, forcing the loyal, if uncomprehending
Bedivere to obey his difficult command to cast away Excalibur.
Arthur meets each of these trials alone, in the sense that only he
can decide what he will believe and how he will act: loneliness,
or at least aloneness, is the fundamental condition of all human
decision, even in the midst of community. The Idylls of the
King, In Memoriam, and " The Two Voices " all reveal that
assent, which must provide the basis for all human community,
paradoxically must take place in isolation. Every man thus
necessarily makes his decisions by himself, within himself. But
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as Arthur's trials progress, this fundamental human isolation
becomes even more strongly emphasized as he increasingly finds
himself stripped of whatever moral support he might receive
from his fellow men. On the march westward, when he doubts
God's purpose, he has already lost Lancelot, the Queen, and
those knights now dead or traitors. By the close of that nightmare battle on the barren strand he has lost all his men but
Bedivere and, as he says, seems but a king among the dead.
Finally, when he must surmount the betrayals of Bedivere, he
stands starkly, nakedly alone, for even this last, most loyal companion has now become an antagonist during this time of trial.
As we shall observe, each of Arthur's tests and those of
Bedivere as well emphasizes Tennyson's idea that belief and
commitment must provide the centre for human life if it is to
rise above the bestial. For the poet there is an essential relation
between man's capacity to believe to have faith and to live
morally and loyally to keep faith with oneself, one's fellow men,
and one's god. Since this closing idyll is presenting the
pessimistic side of the problem, he emphasizes the major,
fundamental difficulties man has in having and keeping faith,
and in so doing he explains once more how the Round Table
failed. In contrast, " The Coming of Arthur " begins the poem
by demonstrating a successful example of the process by which
men authenticate their beliefs, enabling them to act; and though
Tennyson quite frankly reveals the essentially subjective, nonrational nature of such decision, yet he manages to present a
hopeful picture just as he does in In Memoriam, the poem in
which he presents his own experience of faith, doubt, and
authentication.1 " Gareth and Lynette " similarly presents an
1 For this idea of conversion or authentication of belief, see Carlisle Moore,
" Faith, Doubt, and Mystical Experience in ' In Memoriam' ", Victorian
Studies, vii (1963), 155-69; and my "Faith, Doubt, and Authentication in
' The Coming of Arthur ' ", Costerus Essays in English Literature and Philology
(Holland), forthcoming. In addition to Moore's fine essay, other works to
which I am particularly indebted include : Jerome H. Buckley, Tennyson: The
Growth of a Poet (Harvard University Press, 1960) and " The Pattern of Conversion " in The Victorian Temper (Cambridge, Mass., 1951) ; E. D. H. Johnson,
The Alien Vision of Victorian Poetry (Princeton University Press, 1952); and
F. E. L. Priestly, " Idylls of the King A Fresh View ", in Critical Essays on the
Poetry of Tennyson, ed. John Killham (New York, 1967).
" THE PASSING OF ARTHUR "
427
optimistic picture of the problems of having and keeping faith,
for it depicts the springtime of the realm. In this happiest,
most youthful section of The Idylls of the King we perceive
Arthur's new knight able to prove himself a true member of the
Round Table because he has faith and keeps faith with his king.
In the Geraint poems the mood has already begun to darken, and
although all ends happily, we observe the painful effects of a
jealousy which leads a great knight to break faith with himself,
his wife, his people and his king. But by the close of these two
Idylls both Geraint and Edryn, the proud warrior he had earlier
subdued, are seen to have found regeneration in new faith.
" Balin and Balan", Tennyson's last contribution to his
Arthurian cycle, reveals human limitations in starker outline,
for the madness of Balin leads to the bitter tragedy of one whose
psychology and fate including Vivien will not permit him to
believe in himself, knighthood, or Arthur. Fortune's wheel is
already on a downward turn, and the only regeneration, the only
restoration, comes when the two brothers die happy in their
illusions. " Merlin and Vivien " next dramatizes the failure of
faith even more darkly, showing how Vivien, who can neither
keep faith nor even conceive of keeping it, seduces the ancient
wizard whose faith in himself and Arthur has begun to weaken.
In " Lancelot and Elaine ", which reveals a heroine who is all
in truth that Vivien had pretended to be, we see for the first
time the adultery of Lancelot and the Queen, and the direct
effect of this broken faith upon another person. " The Holy
Grail ", perhaps the most brilliant of the Idylls, shows the
further destruction of the Round Table as many of its members
seek a short cut to heaven, in essence breaking faith with Arthur
to receive religious forgiveness. " Pelleas and Ettarre " continues this theme by presenting a young knight, an elaborate
foil to Gareth, who becomes a member of the Round Table for
the wrong reasons not to keep faith with God, man, and the
king, but to win an as yet unknown lady. The cruel, false
Ettarre, like the false Gawain, breaks faith with the young knight
who has continually placed his faith in the wrong people and
ideas. When he learns that even Lancelot has not been able to
keep his vows, he becomes untrue to himself, denying that he
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had ever really loved. Turning himself into a cynical incarnation
of unfaith, Pelleas calls himself the Red Knight and sets up a
bestial parody of the Round Table. He and his followers meet
with dreadful deaths in " The Last Tournament", which
Tennyson realized was the saddest part of the Idylls. When
Arthur leads his young knights to restore the order that had
savagely been destroyed by Pelleas's followers, they betray their
vows and wreak massacre upon their drunken enemy. Meanwhile, Lancelot further betrays Arthur by carelessly conducting
the tournament at which all break faith. The discourteous and
disloyal Tristram captures the prize, taking it to his mistress,
Mark's wife, to whom he has already been unfaithful, only to
meet death at the hands of the faithless king of Cornwall. When
Arthur returns he discovers he has been betrayed by the two
people in whom he placed greatest faith, and that Modred has
finally shattered the Round Table. " Guinevere", which
reviews the Queen's guilty love, ends on a note of qualified
optimism, for after Arthur has come to her in the nunnery
where she has fled for refuge, she experiences what we may well
term a " conversion " for the first time she believes in Arthur,
and though she cannot fully understand him, she realizes both
what he had tried to accomplish and what she has destroyed. By
the last part of The Idylls of the King, doubt and breaking faith
have brought us to the point where we find Arthur lying wounded
within a barren wasteland of rock and ruin. Nonetheless,
however much Tennyson may remain sceptical about man's
capacity to have and keep faith enough to create an ideal,
completely humane society, he yet sees some cause for hope in
the fact that even men with the limitations of Bedivere, and they
are many, can make soul triumph over sense.
Arthur's first test in " The Passing of Arthur " comes when
agonizing over the existence of evil which must be the central
problem for any religious faith he asks the same questions that
In Memoriam does : why does it seem "as if some lesser god
had made the world,/ But had not force to shape it as he would "
(14-15)? Is it perhaps that the earth awaits another god to
triumph over evil, making this world good and beautiful ? Even
as the King voices this doubt (which Tennyson glossed as the
" THE PASSING OF ARTHUR "
429
" gnostic belief that lesser Powers created the world " [p. 1742 n.]),
he realizes that a more likely explanation of evil is that the
world is
wholly fair,
But that these eyes of men are dense and dim,
And have not power to see it as it is :
Perchance, because we see not to the close.
(18-21)
In other words, that essential " war of Sense and Soul typified
in individuals "* which the previous idylls have dramatized is
more a matter of epistemology than morality. Tennyson, one
recalls, had originally intended to entitle his poem " The False
and the True ",2 and in fact it is precisely this opposition and
the way man tries to resolve it that provide the larger subjects
of the entire Idylls. As Arthur here emphasizes, the problem of
distinguishing false from true the problem of faith arises in
our limited and limiting faculties. " The Passing of Arthur ",
like In Memoriam, concerns itself with dramatizing the various
roads by which men arrive at belief.
Arthur thus resists the first temptation he faces in this idyll,
for he refuses to let the evidence of the limited senses crush the
soul's faith. But although he has triumphed over a broad
theological doubt, he has yet to face the more specific fear that
God has abandoned him. He is in great pain because he knows
that although he has had faith and kept faith, his great purpose
has come to nought. Because all his trust " in wife and friend "
(24), which were the foundation of his rule, have been betrayed
because others have not kept faith with him his " realm/ Reels
back into the beast, and is no more " (25-26). Making us think
of Christ's plaint on the cross, Arthur exclaims " My God, thou
1 Ricks, p. 1464, quotes the following from Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Lord
Tennyson: A Memoir (London, 1897), ii. 130 : " if Epic unity is looked for in
the Idylls, we find it not in the wrath of an Achilles, nor in the wanderings of an
Ulysses, but in the unending war of humanity in all ages, the world-wide war of
Sense and Soul, typified in individuals, with the subtle interaction of character
upon character ...".
2 See Ricks, p. 1465. Charles Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson (New York, 1949),
p. 317 explains that the original title " The False and the True " was abandoned
when Lena Eden published a novel with that title. Critics have generally
assumed that the conflict between false and true, like that between sense and
soul, is entirely a matter of morality. As this entire essay attempts to demonstrate,
these oppositions must also be thought of in epistemological terms.
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hast forgotten me in my death " (27), but immediately after his
brief lapse of faith, he pulls himself up short, affirming his belief
that God keeps faith with man : " Nay God my Christ I
pass but shall not die " (28). Thus having surmounted the
doubts which result from his perception of the evils of human
nature in general and his own betrayals in particular, the King
falls asleep and receives what we may term his reward for
steadfastness.
Like Achilles, like Aeneas, like Dante, Arthur is granted
contact with the dead ; and like Tennyson himself in the ninetyfifth In Memoriam lyric, that contact with the dead acts to
confirm a faith, and hence comes as a reward for enduring
severe spiritual trial. Although there are other events which
resemble dreams in this surrealist idyll, this is the last literal
dream we come upon in the poem. It should remind us how
Tennyson has previously employed dreams and visions throughout The Idylls of the King. They not only add an element of the
marvellous appropriate to the Romance subject, but they also
provide opportunity for him to employ his great talent at creating
panels, tapestries, and brief set-pieces of symbolic statement
which further the action and restate the main themes. For
example, the prophetic dreams of Merlin, Elaine, Tristram, and
Guinevere all serve to warn of coming disastrous effects of
breaking faith, while simultaneously directing our attention to
the poet's ideas about the ambiguous nature of reality.
Leodogran's dream, which provides the climactic moment in
" The Coming of Arthur ", further serves to effect the monarch's
conversion to the cause of the young king. Like those waking
visions alluded to in " The Holy Grail ", Arthur's dream in
this last idyll comes as a reward for his faith and faithful
action.
Gawam's appearance in this dream also serves to emphasize
the Tennysoman concern with man's need to have faith and keep
it. Clearly, Gawain, who had been blown along by the wandering
wind of his passions during his life, in Dantesque fashion repeats
this action after death ; whereas the King, who had remained
true to himself, his people, and his God, is promised a place of
rest and peace.
" THE PASSING OF ARTHUR "
431
There came on Arthur sleeping, Gawain killed
In Lancelot's war, the ghost of Gawain blown
Along a wandering wind, and past his ear
Went shrilling, " Hollow, hollow all delight!
Hail, King ! Tomorrow thou shalt pass away.
Farewell! there is an isle of rest for thee.
And I am blown along a wandering wind,
And hollow, hollow, hollow all delight."
(30-37)
Tennyson is apparently alluding to the fifth canto of the Inferno
where the great lovers Helen, Cleopatra, Paris, Tristram, and,
of course, Paolo and Francesca are similarly blown about
through eternity because, subjecting reason to passion, they
allowed themselves to be carried away by physical love. That
Dante's Paolo and Francesca fell through reading about Lancelot's
adulterous love for Guinevere further enforces Tennyson's point
about the tragic results of human inability to keep faith. It is
particularly fitting that Gawain, the warrior light of faith, should
be the figure thus to come to Arthur in his dream, for again in the
manner of Dante, Tennyson seems to be using those damned by
their own actions both to prophesy and to teach the reader the
nature of the sin that all must shun.
Throughout the Idylls this knight represents those who try
neither to believe nor to act loyally. In " The Coming of
Arthur ", where the reader first encounters Gawain, he acts
characteristically when Bellicent sends him from the throne room
while she and Leodogran confer; for whereas Modred
characteristically eavesdrops, ear against door, Gawain carelessly
" breaking into song/ Sprang out, and followed by his flying hair/
Ran like a colt, and leapt at all he saw" (319-21). But by
" Lancelot and Elaine " his pleasant lightness, perhaps fitting
for a young boy, has become rank in manhood : Gawain is
neither obedient to his king " Nor often loyal to his word " (557).
He disobeys Arthur by giving the jewels won at the disastrous
tourney to Elaine, rather than seeking out the victorious knight,
and Arthur angrily tells him he has acted with false courtesy to
the young maid : "Ye shall go no more/ On quest of mine,
seeing that ye forget/ Obedience is the courtesy due to kings "
(711-13). In " The Holy Grail " this knight who had so lightly
broken his vows to Arthur to seek the holy vessel, equally easily
abandons the search when it begins to bore :
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For I was much awearied of the Quest:
But found a silk pavilion in a field,
And merry maidens in it; and then this gale
Tore my pavilion from the tenting-pin,
And blew my merry maidens all about
With all discomfort; yea, and but for this,
My twelvemonth and a day were pleasant to me.
(741-7)
The lightness with which Gawain treats matters of faith, such as
the Grail, and that faith which must be kept, such as his oath to
the King, is seen more darkly in " Pelleas and Ettarre " where he
promises to win the heart of the cruel woman for the young
knight by lying that he has killed him, thus supposedly provoking
her to remorse and wakening love. But after pledging both his
own word and the honour of the entire Round Table, he betrays
Pelleas and hence himself, his king, and the other members of
the fellowship. The material effect of this faithlessness appears
in the servant whom Pelleas savagely disfigures and sends to
Camelot in " The Last Tournament ".
Thus, it is most appropriate for Tennyson to use Gawain to
represent those who break faith in the hierarchy he creates in
" The Passing of Arthur ". The King, of course, has attained
the highest level men can reach, for he has firm faith and keeps
faith with all. Below him in the hierarchy stands Bedivere, the
loyal, if limited knight who represents natural man at his best
man, in other words, who can only rise above himself when under
the influence of someone like Arthur. Gawain then epitomizes
those without faith, those too intellectually lazy, too morally lax
to concern themselves overmuch with thinking or acting in any
way which limits their pleasures. Modred, who like Mark and
Vivien has a pathological inability to believe in anything or
anybody, takes his place at the very bottom of this hierarchy of
human nature as the embodiment of unfaith. If Arthur is very
frequently described in terms that remind one of Christ, then
Modred's obvious analogue is Satan.1 Since he, Gawain, and
Gareth, who appears in an earlier idyll, are brothers, one is
1 For instance, in " Guinevere ", lines 21-34, Modred is caught spying over
the garden wall, like Satan in Paradise Lost, and when Lancelot, not recognizing
him, hurls him to the ground, Tennyson likens the evil prince to a worm, a
traditional emblem of Satan. The poet also describes Vivien, who in many ways
is Modred's analogue, in terms of Satan stealing into the Garden of Eden.
" THE PASSING OF ARTHUR "
433
tempted to believe that Tennyson intentionally imitated Dante,
whose practice it is to apportion three members of the same family
in different realms of the afterlife, placing one each in Hell,
Purgatory, and Heaven. Even within " The Passing of Arthur "
itself, this analogy to Dante holds to some extent, since the King
is reputed to be related to Gawain and Modred though, of
course, this is not the case.
When Tennyson used Arthur's dream to emphasize his main
themes, he characteristically modified both his own earlier work
and that of Malory. The " Morte d*Arthur ", which provided
the core of " The Passing of Arthur ", included no such dream.
The Heath manuscript of the poem, however, contains a mention
of a dream in which Gawain comes to Arthur, as he does in
Malory, to warn him not to fight. By the time Tennyson came
to rework this Arthurian material for the final section of the
Idylls, he retained the dream visitation but modified it to reward
the faithful king in his time of trial.
Bedivere, always the man to underestimate the marvellous,
dismisses Gawain's ghostly prophecies, telling his king to "go
forth and conquer as of old " (64). The far wiser Arthur
realizes that their coming battle, his second trial, will be far
different from those glorious triumphs when he and his Round
Table together drove first the Romans and then the heathen
from the realm. Indeed, even if he conquers, he cannot do so
"as of old " : since whereas he formerly fought an external
enemy, he now fights internal ones, men who were once his own.
Fully realizing that the " king who fights his people fights
himself " (72), Arthur tells Bedivere that the stroke that destroys
" my knights, who loved me once... is as my death to me "
(73-74). This admission does more than reveal his continued
love for those who have sinned against him : it demonstrates his
awareness that the blows that will kill the traitor knights will
simultaneously kill the Arthur of old, since without these men,
once of the fellowship, he cannot remain completely himself
the great king who could unite his kingdom, giving men someone
in whom to believe. Thus, Arthur can defeat Modred's forces,
preventing them from gaining the realm, but he cannot be
victorious in any important sense, since the very fact that the
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members of the fellowship fight each other means that his great
purpose has failed.
Nonetheless, even though he well perceives the necessarily
tragic outcome of the battle, he steels himself with bleak courage
to continue driving Modred's forces through the " blind haze
(76) until, at last, he traps them between barren coast and sea.
Then, at the winter solstice, " that day when the great light of
heaven/ Burned at his lowest in the rolling year,/ On the waste
sand by the waste sea they closed " (90-92). " A deathwhite
mist " (95) covers all,
and even on Arthur fell
Confusion, since he saw not whom he fought.
For friend and foe were shadows in the mist,
And friend slew friend not knowing whom he slew.
(98-101)
Both the wasteland setting of the final battle and the mist which
makes it a nightmare of confusion are Tennyson's additions to
Malory. Here as throughout the Idylls this master of expressionist landscape surrounds his figures with an external
nature symbolizing their inner condition. The poet himself
pointed out that " This grim battle in the mist contrasts with
Arthur's glorious battle in the Coming of Arthur, fought on a
bright day when ' he saw the smallest rock far on the faintest
hill' 'V The harmony, the faith, the community with which
Arthur and his men act in the first battle raises them above the
levels human nature usually reaches : the perception of the
senses approaches that of the soul as vision approaches the
visionary. When Tennyson implicitly contrasts the preternatural clarity of Arthur's vision in the opening section with his
confusion in the last, he is making a statement not only about the
way political disorder and death necessarily follow loss of faith,
but also about the way an ordering faith, which creates harmony
of sense and soul, makes man whole, complete, a being of perfect
health. Like Milton who believed in a time of physical joy and
health before the Fall, Tennyson traces the very limitation of our
perceptions to breaking faith. Considered from this point of
view, The Idylls of the King is seen to be another tale of paradise
lost.
1 Ricks, p. 1745n.
" THE PASSING OF ARTHUR "
435
At last, however, the mist vanishes, revealing the completely
stark setting of Arthur's personal combat with Modred. In
these magnificient lines Tennyson uses all his characteristic skill
at word and sound painting to describe how
over all that shore,
Save for some whisper of the seething seas,
A dead hush fell; but when the dolorous day
Grew drearier toward twilight falling, came
A bitter wind, clear from the North, and blew
The mist aside, and with that wind the tide
Rose, and the pale King glanced across the field
Of battle : but no man was moving there ;
Nor any cry of Christian heard thereon,
Nor yet of heathen ; only the wan wave
Brake in among dead faces, to and fro
Swaying the helpless hands, and up and down
Tumbling the hollow helmets of the fallen,
And shivered brands that once had fought with Rome,
And rolling far along the gloomy shores
The voice of days of old and days to be.
(120-35)
Clearly, the opposition between Arthur and Modred is so sharp
that no ambiguity, no confusion is possible. But before the
King notices his enemy he looks about the dead men in a dead
world and wonders if he himself be " but King among the
dead" (146). Bedivere, whose loyalty is most important at
this point, swears that Arthur would be his monarch everywhere
even among the dead. When this loyal servant points out
Modred, " the traitor of thine house " (153), Arthur denies that
his enemy was ever so :
My house are rather they who sware my vows,
Yea, even while they brake them, owned me King.
And well for thee, saying in my dark hour,
When all the purport of my throne hath failed,
That quick or dead thou boldest me for King.
(157-61)
Modred, in other words, has not broken faith like the other
traitor knights, for he is incapable of having faith, of keeping it,
of believing in anything. With the strength renewed by
Bedivere's faith in him, Arthur then does " one last act of
kinghood " (163), slaying Modred with Excalibur's " last stroke "
(168), and is himself mortally wounded.
Arthur's third trial comes when after defeating both Modred
and his own doubts, he commands Bedivere to cast away
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Excalibur. In his struggle to make Bedivere obey him by sheer
force of will, and in the knight's struggle to keep faith with his
beloved king, we have the climactic double-test of " The Passing
of Arthur ". This idyll's pattern of three tests recapitulates the
structure of the opening section of The Idylls of the King, where
after Arthur has proved himself rightful lord of the realm by
defending Leodogran's lands and conquering the rebel barons,
he must next obtain the hand of Guinevere from her father, the
grateful, yet still doubting Leodogran. In both the " Coming "
and the " Passing ", Arthur's chief test, to which all builds, is a
matter of making another man move in harmony with his will,
for he must convince both the king of Cameliard and his last
knight to believe in him enough to act as he desires. In thus
placing Arthur off-stage during the central action of each Idyll,
Tennyson not only emphasizes the king's oblique role in the ten
central sections, but also enforces the poem's themes of doubt,
faith, and their relation to noble action.
Bedivere, whose loyalty to Arthur provides a large part of
the concluding idyll's subject, is the average man at his best.
Intolerantly loyal, he cannot understand why others do not
believe in Arthur, and in " The Coming of Arthur " he tells
Leodogran that the only reason the barons do not accept his
lord is that they are too bestial. While this explanation is in
part correct, it obviously much oversimplifies the problems that
some men, including Leodogran, have in granting Arthur's
authenticity. Just as he easily dismisses the doubts of others,
so, too, Bedivere pays little attention to the possibility that his
king is of miraculous origin, for such suggestions have no appeal
to the commonsense warrior. These limitations, this same lack
of imagination, this inability to distinguish between true and
false, appear when he twice disobeys his lord, thus providing
one of Arthur's most painful trials.
Reluctantly leaving the wounded king, Bedivere makes his
way down to the lake shore prepared to do his bidding. But
when he draws Excalibur to hurl it into the lake,
the winter moon,
Brightening the skirts of a long cloud, ran forth
And sparkled keen with frost against the hilt:
For all the haft twinkled with diamond sparks,
" THE PASSING OF ARTHUR "
Myriads of topaz-lights, and jacinth-work
Of subtlest jewellery. He gazed so long
That both his eyes were dazzled as he stood,
This way and that dividing the swift mind,
In act to throw.
437
(221-9)
Breaking faith with his king for the sake of the beautiful sword,
he conceals it and then makes his way slowly back to the ruined
chapel. Arthur immediately perceives that his last companion
has betrayed him, and '* faint and pale " (240) he rebukes him
for having broken faith with his nature, his knightly vows, and
his king : " Thou hast betrayed thy nature and thy name,/ Not
rendering true answer, as beseemed/ Thy fealty, nor like a noble
knight " (241-3). He sends Bedivere forth a second time, for he
still has faith in him, but once again when the knight sees " the
wonder of the hilt " (253) he is unable to obey. Arguing with
himself that if he casts away the sword, " Surely a precious
thing, one worthy note,/ Should thus be lost for ever from the
earth " (257-8), which might give pleasure to many men. He
carries the betrayal farther, beginning to doubt the King's
wisdom, for although it is, he knows, " Deep harm to disobey "
(261) since one has sworn obedience, nonetheless he thinks it not
" well to obey " if " a king demand/ An act unprofitable, against
himself " (263-4). After all, he continues : " The King is sick,
and knows not what he does " (265). With bitter irony Tennyson
has Bedivere, who has now temporarily become another faithless
knight, argue that without the material evidence of Excalibur no
one in later time will give faith to the tales of Arthur's realm.
Bedivere is, and always has been, one of those for whom the
physical proofs count most.
Bedivere's second betrayal is far more serious than his earlier
one. The first time he broke faith with Arthur, the sheer beauty
of Excalibur left him confused, but when he breaks faith a
second time after the King has explained the serious nature of
his first defection, Bedivere now perverts his reason, looking to
justify with intellect what had earlier been a natural temptation
of the senses. To put the opposition in Dantesque (or
Augustinian) terms : when he is first led astray, it is by a
forgiveable abuse of natural appetite; but the second time he
abuses his reason, a higher faculty.
438 THE JOHN RYLANDS UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
Thus " clouded with his own conceit " (278), Bedivere once
more hides Excalibur and returns to Arthur who harshly accuses
him of treason. Immediately comprehending that sense has
conquered in the war with Bedivere's soul, Arthur yet shows his
faith in the man and sends him back again.
When Bedivere returns to Arthur, the King sees immediately
in his eyes that he has finally triumphed over himself and
managed to keep faith. To his question about what he saw
and heard upon hurling the sword into the waters, the knight
replies :
Sir King, I closed mine eyelids, lest the gems
Should blind my purpose, for I never saw,
Nor shall see, here or elsewhere, till I die,
Not though I live three lives of mortal men,
So great a miracle as yonder hilt.
Then with both hands I flung him, wheeling him ;
But when I looked again, behold an arm,
Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful,
That caught him by the hilt, and brandished him
(320-9)
Three times, and drew him under in the mere.
The lines well define the speaker's characteristic limitations.
One might well expect that the mysterious arm which caught
Excalibur more of a miracle than the sword. Bedivere has been
present at Arthur's coronation when the King received the
magical sanction of the light that flowed into Camelot, and he
certainly knew about the Grail's later appearance. But for him
the jewels, the gold, the fine work all purely physical are
more miraculous. This knight, who could see no appeal in the
legends of Arthur's mystic origin, is a practical man, loyal and
true within his limitations, but not one who can conceive of the
spiritual dimensions of human existence. Nonetheless, with a
self-denial that considering his nature is truly heroic, he closes
his eyes, enables soul to triumph over sense, and keeps faith with
Arthur!
Having successfully passed their very different trials, Arthur
and Bedivere receive their appropriate rewards : the three Queens
and their mysterious host convey the King to Avilion, while the
knight, who must remain behind, is granted first the sight of the
magical vessel, then the comfort of Arthur's words, and finally
the vision with which Tennyson ends the poem. Lifting the
" THE PASSING OF ARTHUR "
439
wounded Arthur to his shoulders, Bedivere makes his way
through the darkened wasteland until they reach the shore when
suddenly they see the moon flashing upon the sea and the strange
vessel whose " decks were dense with stately forms,/ Blackstoled, black-hooded, like a dream " (364-5). Giving his last
command as an earthly ruler, Arthur has his vassal place him in
the ship. The Queens come forward to receive him, taking off
his helmet, and he lies among them " like a shattered column "
(389) in a scene that resembles a pieta. Having obeyed his lord,
the good Sir Bedivere, who realizes his coming loneliness in this
new, now lessened world, asks " my Lord Arthur, whither shall
I go? " (395). He sees, too, that " the true old times are dead "
(397), and for him the chance to do great and noble deeds has
vanished from the earth. Such an opportunity had not existed,
says Bedivere, " since the light that led/ The holy Elders with
the gift of myrrh " (400-1) to the Christ-child, and one may have
to wait an equally long time for such a magnificent era to come
again. Bedivere, who rightly feels himself the last survivor of
an heroic age, wants to be assured that life has still meaning.
Like the speaker in the Anglo-Saxon " Wanderer", like
Tennyson after the death of Hallam, Bedivere is looking for a
centre to life.
Arthur's reply makes two important points that once again
emphasize the main themes of The Idylls of the King. First, he
tells his knight to have faith that God is present in history, and
that history, even the destruction of the Round Table, has
meaning and purpose. In a particularly poignant and courageous
assertion of his own faith, Arthur expands upon his words to the
Roman lords come for tribute in " The Coming of Arthur ",
telling Bedivere : " The old order changeth, yielding place to
new,/ And God fulfils himself in many ways,/ Lest one good
custom should corrupt the world" (408-10). Earlier, the
assertion that since the " old order changeth ", he would not
render tribute to now impotent Rome, acts to demonstrate that
the young Arthur well knows in whom to place faith, and he will
not do so in those too weak to keep it. Now in this darkened,
lessened time, Arthur's recognition that his own time has passed
is his final demonstration of faith in God and His ways. He
29
440 THE JOHN RYLANDS UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
thus tells Bedivere to comfort himself, bidding him to pray for
his king's soul.
More things are wrought by prayer
Than this world dreams of. Wherefore, let thy voice
Rise like a fountain for me night and day.
For what are men better than sheep or goats
That nourish a blind life within the brain,
If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer
Both for themselves and those who call them friend?
(415-21)
In this most explicit emphasis of the poem's theme of faith,
Arthur overtly defines man as the being who is able to pray, as
the one being whose nature permits him to have faith. This
problem of having and keeping faith which Tennyson investigates
continuously throughout the poem is, then, more than a matter
of Arthurian times, more than something which concerns man
in relation to his religious, personal, and political existence
alone : faith, the ability to have and keep it, defines the essence
of the human.
At this point, Arthur bids farewell to his vassal, telling him
he believes he is going to the " island-valley of Avilion " (427)
where he will heal his grievous wound. When he finishes
speaking, the boat departs, leaving Bedivere lost in thought. As
the ship withdraws into the distance, becoming a " black dot
against the verge of dawn " (439), the moan of the mysterious
crew dies away as the world becomes deadly still. Thinking
" The King is gone " (443), Bedivere suddenly remembers " the
weird rhyme " (444) which Merlin had pronounced at Arthur's
birth : " From the great deep to the great deep he goes " (445).
This, then, is Bedivere's first reward for obeying his king, and
Tennyson uses it to point out the intimate relation that obtains
between moral action and belief : by keeping faith with Arthur,
his knight becomes able to receive faith. Having loyally obeyed
his king at last, Bedivere finds that both the words and that
higher faith which he had never before been able to comprehend
now spontaneously come to him bringing comfort. Turning
from the mere, the good knight slowly climbs the " iron crag "
(447), which Tennyson transforms into a veritable mountain of
vision, to catch a last glance of the black hull. As he climbs,
" THE PASSING OF ARTHUR "
441
this knight, who had once so easily discounted tales of Arthur's
miraculous origin, cries out: " He passes to be King among the
dead,/ And after healing of his grievous wound/ He comes again "
(449-51). Though mixed with doubt, which is the condition of
all human faith, this belief comes as a reward for Bedivere.
Building to a climax of " vision ", Tennyson next permits the
last member of the Round Table to have two more experiences
that will support his faith in the difficult times to come. First,
from the dawn it seemed there came, but faint
As from beyond the limit of the world
Like the last echo born of a great cry,
Sounds, as if some fair city were one voice
(457-61)
Around a king returning from his wars.
Thereupon he climbs once more, as Tennyson ends The
Idylls of the King with a vision of the rising sun.
Thereat once more he moved about, and clomb
Even to the highest he could climb, and saw,
Straining his eyes beneath an arch of hand,
Or thought he saw, the speck that bare the King,
Down that long water opening on the deep
Somewhere far off, pass on and on, and go
From less to less and vanish into light.
(462-9)
And the new sun rose bringing the new year.
Like Tennyson's own mystical experience in In Memoriam, the
sight of Arthur moving toward Avilion, Heaven, or wherever he
lands is stricken through with doubt even as it occurs ; and yet
it still suffices to provide faith for life. Good Sir Bedivere, the
first made and last left of Arthur's men, has managed to keep
faith with his lord after great trials, and as a reward he becomes
aware of mystical and magical dimensions of existence which
before were beyond his ken. Most important, his experiences
on the mountain crag, however mysterious they may be to him,
yet give him the faith and strength to live in a faithless age. 1
In essence, " The Passing of Arthur ", like the entire poem,
concerns itself with the same problems as In Memoriam and
offers much the same solutions. This close resemblance should
1 Bedivere's climbing the mountain to catch a last glimpse of Arthur and his
resultant vision seem intentionally to echo both Moses' vision from Mt. Pisgah
of the Promised Land (which he cannot enter in life) and Adam's vision of the
future in the last two books of Paradise I^ost. In each case, we remember, man
is given a sight of future bliss as reward, education, and solace.
442 THE JOHN RYLANDS UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
remind us that in its earliest form the tale of Arthur's departure
from this earth, like Tennyson's great elegy, was a direct response
to Hallam's death. Both poems not only emphasize man's
essential need to believe but also those forces which make it so
difficult for him to do so. Equally important, they both
dramatize the process of authentication by which individual men
reach the state of belief. When I point to these similarities I am
not holding that Bedivere is an allegorical representation of
Tennyson, or that King Arthur is Arthur Hallam, or, for that
matter, that Arthur, who is so frequently and elaborately
described in terms of Christ, is meant to be Him. Rather that
Tennyson draws upon these analogous situations to present what
remain his main concerns throughout much of his poetic career :
that both men and their societies must be founded on faith or,
more accurately, on many faiths, on faith between ruler and
ruled, man and woman, worshipper and God; and that such faith,
however essential, is necessarily a tenuous, subjective, nonrational matter. In Memoriam appears optimistic because its
overall movement shows how one man, Tennyson, achieves
faith after great trials, while The Idylls of the King is most
pessimistic because it dramatizes the destruction of an ideal
when men do not keep faith. '* The Passing of Arthur ", while
making it quite clear how the Round Table failed, yet offers
some cause for hope when it presents the trials, triumphs, and
conversion of the ordinary man, Bedivere.